Every sports community has its triumphs and tragedies, and Oakland’s passionate and enduring relationship with sports, particularly basketball, provides it rich representations of each.

From Bill Russell, the all-time leader in championships achieved within a major American team sport, to Jason Kidd, who is undefeated in international competition, true hoops aficionados know of Oakland’s contributions to global basketball royalty.

Comprehensive illustration of the connection between basketball and the city, however, requires peeping into the neighborhoods, feeling the rhythms of its playgrounds, hearing the shrieks of joy and the sobs of sorrow.

That’s where Comcast SportsNet Bay Area went to explore the true-life tales of Leon Powe and Demetrius “Hook” Mitchell, two incredibly talented athletes who in some ways represent a single divided soul.

“The Town Game: Two Lives, Two Paths,” premiering Monday night at 9, examines and illuminates the journeys of both men. Gritty and real, featuring dozens of interviews, it’s an unsparing look at the challenges of surviving, much less legally thriving, within a city equally defined by the imposing images of the Hells Angels and Black Panthers and the storied histories of the Raiders and A’s.

The 55-minute documentary, narrated by former Black Panther Bobby Seale, exhibits, above all, how similar circumstances can yield very different results — with the benefit of a little support and guidance.

It follows Powe’s tortured struggle, from sporadic homelessness as a youngster, through his athletic emergence at Oakland Technical High and Cal, all the way to his current life, one in which he fights to continue a career hampered by two surgically repaired knees.

Powe, 28, overcame serious knee injuries to earn a role with the 2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics but has been out of the league for more than a year. A 6-foot-8, 230-pound power forward, he recently signed with a team in Puerto Rico in hopes of eventually getting another shot at the NBA.

Relegated to the second round of the 2006 NBA draft — teams were leery of his knee problems — Powe obviously represents the triumph.

Mitchell, who came along almost two decades earlier, conceivably is the greatest pure basketball talent to grace local playgrounds. He certainly is the most spectacular.

Though he was about 5-11, Hook was a one-man high-wire act at McClymonds High in the mid-1980s, vaulting over opponents and dunking with ease. But his youth soon spun into an endless loop of substance abuse and street crimes and prison stays, interrupted by periods of freedom. The cycle carried into his 20s and 30s, and he still fights it today.

Though Mitchell spent two seasons at Contra Costa College, the highest level of organized basketball in which he participated was a partial season in the early 1990s at what was then called Cal State-Hayward. He was a gate attraction. He later conceded he never enrolled.

Mitchell’s greatest fame came on the streetball circuit, the natural destination for playground legends. Though many of his contemporaries who reached the NBA, from Kidd to Gary Payton to Brian Shaw to former Mack teammate Antonio Davis, acknowledge Hook’s superiority, he never rated so much as a tryout from the NBA.

Seeing and hearing Mitchell reflect on a past filled with regret — and with little in the way of positive influences — he clearly understands why.

Now 43, Hook, who also has gone by his Islamic name of Waliyy Abdur-Rahim, sees what he might have been when he looks at Powe.

“Look at me,” Mitchell says in a jailhouse interview. “One bad decision and Leon could be in the situation where I’m at.”

With homelessness, stays in group homes and occasional contact with his birth mother who died when he was in high school, young Leon experienced at least as much hardship as Hook. But Powe never gave in. No matter the temptations in his midst, he never gave up on the possibility that basketball could be his salvation.

Indeed, it’s those injuries, and the countless comebacks, that reveal Powe’s character.

“You always got two choices in life,” Powe says. “You either got a left or right. Which way are you going to go?”

He went right, and his career highlight, an electrifying performance in Game 2 of the NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, is properly documented here.

Hook, by contrast, went left. You see on his face a lifetime of bad decisions.

When these two men sit before cameras and microphones, you sense their struggles. You feel their experience. And you understand why young ballers in Oakland believe that which does not kill them makes them stronger.

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